IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/17846.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The effective number of relevant parties : how voting power improves Laakso-Taagepera’s index

Author

Listed:
  • Caulier, Jean-François
  • Dumont, Patrick

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the number of rel- evant parties in an assembly. The most widespread indicator of frag- mentation used in comparative politics is the ‘Effective Number of Par- ties’(ENP), designed by Laakso and Taagepera (1979). Taking both the number of parties and their relative weights into account, the ENP is arguably a good parsimonious operationalization of the number of ‘relevant’ parties. This index however produces misleading results in single-party ma jority situations as it still indicates that more than one party is relevant in terms of government formation. We propose to modify the ENP formula by replacing proportions of seats by voting power measures. This improved index behaves more in line with Sar- tori’s definition of relevance, without requiring additional information in its construction.

Suggested Citation

  • Caulier, Jean-François & Dumont, Patrick, 2005. "The effective number of relevant parties : how voting power improves Laakso-Taagepera’s index," MPRA Paper 17846, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17846
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17846/1/MPRA_paper_17846.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Molinar, Juan, 1991. "Counting the Number of Parties: An Alternative Index," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 85(4), pages 1383-1391, December.
    2. Max Albert, 2004. "The Voting Power Approach," European Union Politics, , vol. 5(1), pages 139-146, March.
    3. Dan S. Felsenthal & Moshé Machover, 1998. "The Measurement of Voting Power," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1489.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Agryzkov, Taras & Tortosa, Leandro & Vicent, Jose F., 2018. "An algorithm to compute data diversity index in spatial networks," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 337(C), pages 63-75.
    2. Scott L. Feld & Bernard Grofman, 2007. "The Laakso-Taagepera Index in A Mean and Variance Framework," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(1), pages 101-106, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dan S. Felsenthal & Dennis Leech & Christian List & Moshé Machover, 2003. "In Defence of Voting Power Analysis," European Union Politics, , vol. 4(4), pages 473-497, December.
    2. Abraham Diskin & Moshe Koppel, 2010. "Voting power: an information theory approach," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 34(1), pages 105-119, January.
    3. Jean-François Caulier, 2010. "On the measurement of Fragmentation," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-00633613, HAL.
    4. Max Albert, 2004. "The Voting Power Approach," European Union Politics, , vol. 5(1), pages 139-146, March.
    5. Claus Beisbart & Luc Bovens & Stephan Hartmann, 2005. "A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules in the Council of Ministers," European Union Politics, , vol. 6(4), pages 395-418, December.
    6. Artyom Jelnov & Pavel Jelnov, 2019. "Success, Survival and Probabilistic Voting: The Case of a ruling Party," Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics, Springer, vol. 36(3), pages 209-226, December.
    7. Leech, Dennis, 2003. "The Utility of the Voting Power Approach," Economic Research Papers 269562, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    8. Jean-François Caulier, 2010. "On the measurement of Fragmentation," Working Papers hal-00633613, HAL.
    9. Antti Pajala & Mika Widgrèn, 2004. "A Priori versus Empirical Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers," European Union Politics, , vol. 5(1), pages 73-97, March.
    10. Vani K. Borooah, 2013. "A general measure of the ‘effective’ number of parties in a political system," Chapters, in: Francisco Cabrillo & Miguel A. Puchades-Navarro (ed.), Constitutional Economics and Public Institutions, chapter 8, pages 146-159, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    11. Kóczy, L.Á., 2006. "Strategic power indices: quarrelling in coalitions," Research Memorandum 049, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    12. Roy, Sonali, 2008. "The exact lower bound for the Coleman index of the power of a collectivity for a special class of simple majority games," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 296-300, September.
    13. Matija Kovacic & Claudio Zoli, 2021. "Ethnic distribution, effective power and conflict," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 57(2), pages 257-299, August.
    14. Mikel Alvarez-Mozos & José María Alonso-Meijide & María Gloria Fiestras-Janeiro, 2016. "The Shapley-Shubik Index in the Presence of Externalities," UB School of Economics Working Papers 2016/342, University of Barcelona School of Economics.
    15. Monisankar Bishnu & Sonali Roy, 2012. "Hierarchy of players in swap robust voting games," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 38(1), pages 11-22, January.
    16. Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann, 2010. "Welfarist evaluations of decision rules under interstate utility dependencies," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 34(2), pages 315-344, February.
    17. Zaporozhets, Vera & García-Valiñas, María & Kurz, Sascha, 2016. "Key drivers of EU budget allocation: Does power matter?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 57-70.
    18. Silvia Fedeli & Francesco Forte, 2001. "Voting Powers and the Efficiency of the Decision-Making Process in the European Council of Ministers," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 5-38, July.
    19. Renneboog, Luc & Szilagyi, Peter G., 2020. "How relevant is dividend policy under low shareholder protection?," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    20. Grabisch, Michel & Rusinowska, Agnieszka, 2011. "Influence functions, followers and command games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 123-138, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voting power indices; Effective Number of Parties; Party system fragmentation; Relevance; Coalition Formation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17846. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.